


Do Not Hand Me Over

by BleuStrawberriez



Series: November [1]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Superman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce Wayne Has Issues, Bruce Wayne is a Bad Parent, Canonical Character Death, Child Neglect, Clark Kent is a Good Friend, Clark Kent is a good parent, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 01:49:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20574464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleuStrawberriez/pseuds/BleuStrawberriez
Summary: Bruce had forgotten that he'd taken a child into his home. Didn't know when he'd begun to lose sight of the boy in the face of his partner. But he had.





	Do Not Hand Me Over

**Author's Note:**

> I want to thank LuthienLuinwe and slifer_the_sky_noodle for taking a look at this fic and helping me edit it. You guys were lots of help!

"I took that boy home, Bruce. He was crying his eyes out. Nearly delirious because the pain killers had long since worn off. What might have happened if Dick hadn't called me?" Clark's eyes are bright. His mouth not quite twisted in a snarl. "Lois nearly called an ambulance when I brought him home. Dick could have gotten an infection."

Bruce doesn't acknowledge the pit that sits low and heavy in his stomach. Clark's eyes grow softer, the disappointment making its way across his face and settling in the blue of his eyes. The sight of it burns something in Bruce.

"I'm not sending him back to Gotham. Not like this. You..." Clark sighs, broad shoulders slumping. Superman looks smaller now. Exhausted and heart-broken. It's a strange and sobering sight. No matter the snarling thing inside of Bruce that sneers and smarts at it. "Bruce. I love you. You know I do. But I think-I think it'd be better if Dick stayed with me for now. I'll come by soon. Pick up his things. He can share Chris's room for now while Lo and I clear out our study. Jon already loves him. We'll work something out. But you..."

Bruce can feel anger and fear swelling inside of him. Wants to open his mouth and snarl that Clark has no right. But bright eyes flash across his mind. Fear filled blue eyes. A sobbing voice. Anger and fear churning, dark and ugly and poisonous, in the pit of his stomach like one of Crane's concoctions.

He could still feel the desperation clinging to his skin even now. Days after the fight.

Dick's voice is still ringing in his ears, calling him “dad” referring to his parents as his grandparents. The anger rising in the child's voice, mixing with the despair that was rushing through his slender frame as he spat out one horrible truth after another. Raising Bruce's own inadequacies as a care-giver against him.

Bruce can still recall the moment his body had begun moving on its own. His fist rising, nearly smashing into soft skin and hard bone, but pausing just as the child flinched before him. Instinct had drawn him forward in the face of his near blind rage. Nearly driven Bruce to the point of physically harming the child in his care.

Bitterness sits heavy inside of him. A bitter pill dragging along soft flesh. Tearing the inside of his throat. He can almost taste it. Iron and copper. Something hot and ugly.

"You need to figure this out, B."

Bruce had forgotten that he'd taken a child into his home. Didn't know when he'd begun to lose sight of the boy in the face of his partner. But he had.

He didn't know where he'd gone wrong.

Didn't know _if_ he'd gone wrong.

Dick wasn't...

Bruce had not taken him into the Manor with the intent of _raising_ a child. He'd witnessed a family's murders. Watched the older Graysons, Richard and Karla, fall to their deaths. The couple's only child, John, wrapped in the arms of his father as he turned mid-air in a desperate, futile, attempt to save his son. The boy's mother falling. Her eyes locked with her husband's. Hope, fear, grief in her eyes and the sharp lines of her face as she reached out for them. Her hand never even skimming the gentle curve of her son's outstretched fingers before she hit the floor with a sickening thud.

The boy, Johnny according to police reports, didn't make it.

Johnny’s father's head cracked against the sawdust covered floor. Johnny’s head had been cushioned by his father's chest. Their necks snapped with the force of the impact. His father's arms wrapped tightly around him even as he lay bleeding on the ground. Wide brown eyes staring sightless across the arena as the crowds screamed with fear rather than delight in the stands.

However, the father survived. Vegetative from brain damage caused by blunt force trauma. Bed-ridden and paralyzed from the neck down due to the impact causing damage to the spinal cord. It was expected that he'd live out his life on life support. The specialists Bruce had had flown in from all over the country in those early years all had the same thing to say. He'd been told that the kindest fate he could offer the elder Richard Grayson would be to pull him off of life support. Allow nature to take its course and let him die peacefully.

The son died. Neck broken from the whiplash effect of being held so tightly to his father before suddenly coming to a halt against the hard-packed ground of the tent's floor. The injury had occurred just underneath the brain-stem. Caused rapid swelling along the severed spinal cord and disrupted the flow of blood to the child's brain. He'd died quickly in his father's arms. The damage to his nervous system along his spinal cord had ensured that.

For all that the Graysons deaths were gruesome. They were quick.

Clark's voice cut through the gentle fog that clouded his mind.

"Dick needs his father. Not the Batman." Voice soft. Gentle. Understanding. Clark was no longer frowning but wasn't quite smiling either. His mouth drawn into a thin line. The sight surprisingly unwelcome.

_ 'Bruce. I want to talk to my dad. N-Not Batman.' _

Bruce frowned. Mouth twisting almost without conscious effort.

Dick wasn't his son.

"He's not my son." Bruce almost didn't recognize the growl in his voice. The sound coarse and rough. Like gravel crunching underneath his feet.

His student, yes.

His partner in many ways.

Not...

But not...

Bruce had never intended to _raise him_.

He'd seen a like-minded soul in the newly orphaned child. Thought of his own childhood. The ghosts that had haunted him then in the Manor's long hallways, echoing bedchambers, and wide grounds. They still lingered even now, so many years after his parents deaths. He'd thought of what he'd wanted as a child.

A purpose. A balm for the aching wounds that oozed bloody infected pus into his psyche. The means to prevent other children losing their loved ones. The knowledge to prevent parents losing their children. The ability to keep people from losing their lives to things worse than death. He'd been a child at eight. He'd stopped being a child the moment his parents were killed.

Dick Grayson had lost his parents, John and Mary, at that same age.

Dick watched them fall to their deaths.

Felt his mother's hands on his own as they'd fallen. Heard the tears in her voice as Mary had whispered her final words to him and tossed him back up to the platform. Prayed to whichever deity brought her comfort and hoped that her son would make it.

He'd listened to the sound his father's body made as it hit the floor. The meaty thud. The snap of brittle bone.

Dick had cried and watched as blood pooled underneath their bodies. His own small slender form clinging to the pole behind him with the desperation of the damned. Silent and tense as firemen worked to separate him from it. Finally cracked and screamed the moment his feet hit the ground. Slipped out from underneath their grasping hands and open mouths to race to his parents’ bodies. Unaware of the blood staining his shoes and clinging to his skin as he fell to his knees on the bloody congealed mess that the sawdust had become.

Bruce had seen himself in the sobbing child. In the awful moment he'd beheld.

His mother's pearls flying through the air rather than the Graysons. Glimmering like little white stars in the wan light of the distant streetlamps ahead of them in contrast to the bright lights above the stands highlighting unnaturally bent limbs and coppery blood on the floor. Her screams echoed in his ears with the same bloodcurdling intensity of his date's. His father's voice in the calm soothing strain of the ringmaster.

He'd seen himself in Dick's bright eyes. In the grief that clouded his features. The shock that rippled through the child's body. The anger that lingered on the corners of his lips and tight lines around his eyes. Even mere moments after his parents deaths Dick had already known what had happened.

Bruce had taken him in so as to prevent another tragedy. Fought the courts both public and legal in an attempt to keep the child safe. The newly orphaned boy had taken to the streets in the hopes of finding his family's killer. Child Protective Services had taken him from a loving, if strange, home and placed him in an unforgiving institution for underage criminals and the other children that the city deemed 'unwanted and unwelcome'.

But Bruce had never thought to take John Grayson's place in Dick's life. He'd only thought to keep him alive. To train him and ensure that he could protect himself. Make it so that the boy could fight the same factors that led to his family's deaths.

Clark's mouth was twisted now. Unhappiness lingering in the corners of his handsome face. Anger shimmering in blue eyes that weren't quite red-hot.

"He's always been your son, Bruce. You just never saw it." A stubborn tilt of the jaw and that particular furrow between his brows. Bruce recognized them. Had seen them too often in the mirror-like gleam of the windows as he soared past them on a deceptively thin cable. He could recognize the set of Clark's shoulders. The way he crossed his arms. They’d spent too much time together. Both in the field and off of it for Bruce to not recognize the behavioral patterns that he himself often displayed.

It was almost startling to see. To realize that he could see himself mirrored in the set of Clark's shoulders. The angle at which Clark's hip was cocked.

Bruce could see now why Diana always wore an amused expression on her face during missions.

"You're scared by the realization. The depth of Dick's feelings for you. Your own regard for him. I know. I get it." His voice grew softer. Understanding underneath the stubbornness that encapsulated Clark Kent. "I was scared the moment I realized what I was feeling as I soothed an equally frightened child in a sterile government facility. I felt that same fear not even a few months ago when I held my baby in my arms for the first time. You took that boy into your life. Gave him a roof over his head, food to fill his belly, and a safe space to grieve his parents and recover."

Bruce shifted. Felt muscles bunch and ripple with the slight movement. His shoulders stiffening as Clark's gaze lingered warm and heavy on him.

"It's not enough to say it. Not now. I don't know if that boy will ever recover from this." Something not quite like pity filled Clark's eyes. Softened them as he turned that ardent earnest gaze on Bruce. "I won't send him back to the Manor. Not when you refuse to admit your own feelings for him. Not when you are so divided on this. Not when you can't even bring yourself to admit to me that you care about him.

"You're a good man underneath your incessant need to be exactly the opposite. But Dick needs security in his life. More than just the stability of home and hearth. He needs emotional support and stability too.

"It's frightening being the center of someone's world like that." Clark's mouth had softened into a gentle curve. His eyes seemingly brighter in their intensity. "Someone so small and fragile. Thinking the _world_ of you. Knowing wholeheartedly that you'd fight just to keep them safe."

Bruce couldn't quite help the noise that escaped his mouth. The sound deep and derisive as he took in the sight before him. The earnestness in Clark's expression. The warmth in his eyes. The fondness in the gentle curve of his lips.

"Neither of your children could be called fragile by any sense of the word." The words came out of his mouth in a deep rumbling growl. A more inhuman sound than the fond look Clark was leveling him now.

"No. But that's not the point."

**Author's Note:**

> It's not tagged due to it being brief and the neglect tag fitting the entirety of this fic so well. But Bruce thinks about the fact that he nearly hit Dick during the heat of the moment just days before this fic starts. The fic is working off of the premise that this is shortly after Bruce fired Dick for being injured and resulted in an argument of epic proportions. So the fic is partly inspired by Batman #408. Though Dick is several years younger here than he was in the comic.
> 
> This entire fic is basically my Ode To Clark Kent. Because he's the best friend that anyone can ask for. But he will not put up with your bullshit. This is also part of my 'Fuck DC, Chris exists' personal hc which coincides with my Clark Kent is a Good Parent tag. Cause he is. He loves his kids, will do anything for them, and will happily take Dick off Bruce's hands if he isn't willing to see passed his own hurts and trauma to see the wonderful kid in front of him.
> 
> Bruce's relationship with Dick is a particularly tragic thing. I love it and hope to explore it more in the future.


End file.
